La Ravisseuse (2005)

La Ravisseuse is a French film first released in 2005, directed by Antoine Santana.  The film stars Isild Le Besco, Émilie Dequenne, Grégoire Colin, Anémone and Frédéric Pierrot.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


1870s France.  An 18-year-old nurse, Angèle-Marie, is hired to take care of the newly born baby of a young bourgeois couple, Julien et Charlotte Orcus.  Since giving birth, Charlotte has been unable to sleep with her husband, so he naturally finds himself drawn to the attractive young nurse.  Unaware of this, Charlotte begins to regard Angèle-Marie as a friend, and the latter reveals that before accepting the position as a nurse, she had just given birth herself...

With its suitably moody photography and design (which is strangely evocative of the novels of the Brontë sisters), La Ravisseuse offers a poignant account of the fate of many young women in bygone times – girls who were compelled to abandon their own new-born children so that they could work as nurses for the better off.   It’s the second full-length film from the promising new director Antoine Santana, and stars the captivating Isild Le Besco, a talented young actress blessed with an almost unreal Pre-Raphaelite beauty (which serves this film particularly well).   Le Besco featured in Santana’s previous film Un moment de bonheur (2002).   

The film’s atmospheric sombre-toned cinematography and claustrophobic period sets are more successful at suggesting the tension between the three main characters than the insubstantial screenplay, although the performances – particularly those of Le Besco and Émilie Dequenne – effectively convey the tragedy and bleak injustice of Angèle-Marie’s situation.  What most prevents the film from being a conventional period drama are its bizarre excursions into Cocteau-like surrealism, sequences which portray the mental flights of fancy of the protagonists.  The most striking of these is a haunting male masturbatory fantasy, an imaginative example of "art erotica" which tacitly underscores the main theme of the film, the brutal subjugation of women.

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